Reach for the Staa-aaars! -- Halo: Reach

It started on November 15, 2001. I was visiting my friend Luke in Missoula, and he had just bought Microsoft’s first game console: the Xbox. He was at Best Buy, trying to decide which game to get, and before long picked out a racing game by Bizarre Studios called Project Gotham Racing. I suggested that a racing game’s appeal might be limited (read: it would get super repetitive after a while), and he decided to go with his other choice: a shooter by Bungie called Halo.

So began my experience with Halo. We both did not go gently into that good night (sky) alone, but instead joined each other in campaign co-op, resulting in what is still one of my most vivid, memorable gaming experiences ever. Over grass, snow, and repetitive corridor (damn you, “The Library”) did we wage war, capping fools and showing The Covenant what the human race was capable of. We had the technology. And we shoved it right up their ass.

I open with this vignette illustrate what Halo means to me: good times with buddies, where shooting at each other is fun, and shooting with each other is even better. Halo: Reach, Bungie’s final title in the Halo universe, captures this spirit perfectly, with a tight, focused single player campaign and a robust multiplayer mode—Reach takes everything I loved about the first game and polishes it to a mirror shine. I started the franchise with a buddy back in 2001, and put the franchise to an end with a buddy in 2011. The circle is now complete, and it rocks.

How epic is this game? Pretty damn.

The plot of Halo: Reach (which 87.3% of gamers will not give a pair of fetid dingo’s kidneys about) concerns Noble Team, a group of Spartans on the planet Reach. You play as Noble Six, a last-minute replacement for a recently-deceased commanding officer in the group. In the beginning, Noble Team is called to investigate why a relay station went offline. It turns out there are Covenant on Reach, which is bad news bears: Reach is humanity’s big military force in the galaxy, and if anything happened to Reach, it would probably mean curtains for the entire human race.

The rest of the game’s narrative follows Noble Team as they attempt to defend Reach from The Covenant, watching as the threat grows from small groups to a full-on invasion force. Reach will fall (if you think this counts as a spoiler, you’re about ten years late to the party), and watching it happen is much more exciting than I thought it would be. It’s like a movie about a famous disaster: you already know what’s going to happen in the end, but the characters and small twists help propel the story along. All’s not entirely predictable, though—in true Back to the Future Part II form, your behind-the-scenes actions have a huge impact on the rest of the series.

Unlike previous games, your teammates are actual fleshed out characters.

Reach’s single player campaign is, for my money, the best in the franchise. It spins a tight narrative, and strikes and almost-perfect balance between Covenant slaying, tension-building downtime, and clever diversions (manning a chopper turret, piloting a spacecraft, etc.). The Covenant have been stripped of their ability to speak English, and their alien grunts and yells make them all the more strange and terrifying. Level design is beautiful and far more intuitive than in the past; no longer will you need arrows on the floor to know where to go next. Also (SPOILER ALERT), there are absolutely no Flood in this game, mercifully kicking my least favorite part of the series to the curb.

Reach also simplifies the gameplay to a great extent, removing almost all unneeded game mechanics introduced in subsequent entries in the series (read: almost all game mechanics introduced in subsequent entries in the series). Rather than juggling four grenades, add-on equipment, dual-wielding, and who knows what else, you’re back to the original trilogy of guns, grenades, and melee, and the game plays much better for it.

Reach does introduce one new mechanic, though: the equipment-replacing Armor Abilities. A nice diversion in single player, and absolutely essential in multiplayer, Armor Abilities are perk-like skills players can activate to shake things up on the battlefield. They range from the basic Sprint (which I’ve been wanting since 2007) to the useful Cloak (invisibility ON!) to the tricky-but-awesome Armor Lock (an ability that makes you invulnerable for a set period of time while standing still), and each of them is useful in their own special way.

Rain death from above with the Jetpack ability. It's as awesome as it looks.

Multiplayer is incredibly bitchin’. The matchmaking in Reach is absolutely top-notch, with filters for almost everything, including for those jerks that can’t stop using the microphone. Players can vote on which map to play on between rounds, giving the experience little bits of variety, as well as democracy. Maps are well-balanced, and don't repeat as often as they did in Halo 3. Moreover, the matchmaking from Halo 3 has been streamlined, and players no longer have to experience 2+ minute waits between matches while the game finds different people to play with. Lastly, Halo: Reach allows for split-screen online multiplayer, allowing you and three of your on-the-couch buddies to duke it out with the world on Xbox Live. As someone who was reared on GoldenEye 007, local multiplayer is what it's all about, and Reach allows for the same smashmouth, social gaming that got me into shooters in the first place.

The game's not entirely perfect, though. The campaign can feel a little short sometimes (though, make no mistake: it's EXACTLY as long as it needs to be), and it's easy to feel like you're being shuttled from one battlefield to another. Also, there's no way for friends to join an already in-progress multiplayer match, putting a slight kink in the social multiplayer hose. Finally, Reach's tone is fairly somber compared to the rest of the series; fans of Halo 3's humor and antics will be disappointed (that said, I was never a fan of said wacky antics, so this decision suits me just fine).

These small quibbles aside, Halo: Reach still stands as one of the best games of last year, and everything you would expect from Microsoft's little space marine that could. As casual as it needs to be, or as hardcore as you want it to be, Halo is one of the rare One Size Fits All franchises in gaming, and Reach is easily the finest entry in the series. Bungie may be leaving for the more Helghastian shores of Activision, but they've left us a hell of a parting memento with Halo: Reach.

And I Want to Paint it Black -- Call of Duty: Black Ops

It’s that time of year again: Activision has released a new Call of Duty game! That time when gamers come together, shoot each other for XP over Xbox Live, and swear loudly in one voice at that cheating douche who keeps using the noob tube. Some find time for the single player campaign, but those people seem to falling by the wayside in favor of twelve-year-olds that shoot you in the face and call you all kinds of bigot-y names. It is a joyous time indeed.

Anyways, this year’s entry in the Epic 2010 FPS Sweepstakes is Call of Duty: Black Ops. Developed by Treyarch (who, apart from Call of Duty, also makes Activision’s Spider-Man games), Black Ops takes place in the 60’s, and involves many of the conflicts during the era of JFK and The Who. You’ll invade Cuba during the Bay of Pigs, battle against the Russians in almost every corner of the globe, and you bet your sweet ass you’ll listen to CCR’s “Fortunate Son” while landing a helicopter in Vietnam (it’s exactly as clichéd as it sounds). They didn’t manage to work in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that’s neither here nor there.

Every Nam movie ever? Eh, sorta.

Rather than retelling major battles (although there are a few of those), Black Ops spins an original narrative about conspiracy, subterfuge, and about everything else you would expect thematically from a game called “Black Ops.” The plot concerns Alex Mason (Sam Worthington, in his Sam Worthington-iest), a soldier who wakes up in an interrogation room and is grilled about a series of numbers. Alex doesn’t know anything about the numbers, and has to relive several of his past missions in order to make sense of everything. As a plot device to trigger the game’s playable sequences, it’s not a bad concept. Unfortunately, most of the game’s between-mission scenes generally end up playing out something like this:

DEEP VOICE: Tell us about the numbers, Mason!

MASON: F@$# you! I don’t know any f@$#ing think about any f@$#ing numbers!

DEEP VOICE: We know you know about the numbers, Mason!

MASON: The numbers don’t make any f@$#ing sense! I don’t f@$#ing know!

DEEP VOICE: Tell us about that one time you infiltrated that one place!

MASON: That one time at that one place…

[play some mission somewhere]

Seriously. The story would have been more interesting if it weren’t presented in such a monotonous manner. Many reviewers have taken the time to point to the mystery in this campaign and compare it favorably to the “disorganized and confused mess” that was the Modern Warfare 2 single-player (conveniently forgetting all of the praise they had heaped on it a year before). By the time the end rolled around for me, however, I found I didn’t care about the numbers, Mason’s character, or much else that was going on in the story. Good in theory, meh in execution.

This is where most of the story takes place, accompanied by Bourne Supremacy-esque seizure flashbacks. It's riveting.

Which is a shame, because the missions themselves present several interesting scenarios. In one you command an SR-71 Blackbird to guide troops through a snowstorm, and then switch perspectives to the troops on the ground. In another, you pilot a gunboat while working your way though Vietnam. My favorite has you escaping from a Russian POW camp; with its gradual progression in guiding the player from hunted to hunter, it shows a sense of pacing and payoff that many of the missions later on in the campaign lack.

It’s this lack of pacing that ultimately hamstrings my enjoyment of the campaigns. For all Modern Warfare 2’s narrative quirks (I am a rather large fan of the MW2 campaign and all of its huge, why-is-this-happening-who-cares-it’s-awesome moments), it had a taught, super-fast pace that kept the player racing along from one enormous set piece moment to the next. Black Ops wants to have those moments, but doesn’t make them big enough. There are a couple cool spots (that I won’t spoil), but most of the time you’ll be going down a linear corridor (your allies are helpfully marked “Follow,” as though you had a choice in the matter), shooting everything that moves; none of the huge moments ever seem awesome enough to justify some of the poor level- and gameplay-design decisions that must be worked through to get to them.

There are a few water-cooler moments, like this chopper-piloting bit, but they're few and far between.

Which brings me to the biggest gaffe in the Call of Duty: Black Ops campaign: the return of the infinitely-spawning enemies. This design was eliminated in Modern Warfare 2, but is now back with a vengeance. I’ll illustrate this point with a story. There’s a mission where you play through the Battle of Khe Sanh. During the level, I took command of a stationary machine gun as I attempted to fend-off Charlie. My allies were hunkered down beside me, taking an occasional shot and shouting directions: “Up there by the trench line! Beside those barrels! Three o’clock!” All the while, the enemy kept pouring down the hillside toward me. No matter how many I shot, there were more to be found, and my squad’s incessant calls of “By the trench line!” were starting to grate at my nerves. After five minutes of shooting dudes, I realized that

a) There would be no end to this limitless supply of enemies,

b) The enemies would only stop spawning when I crossed some pre-determined line in the level, and

c) This is really, really stupid.

So I did the only thing I could do: I charged the hill and tried to hide until the game would stop spawning foot soldiers. From there on out, I lost any trust I had in the game’s campaign. I was no longer interested in planting myself in cover, clearing the enemy out one-by-one, and moving forward only when I felt safe; I knew that I would find myself in a position like Khe Sanh, where my efforts of playing smart would only result in wasted ammo and 15 extra minutes I would throw away before my inevitable respawn. In a way, it’s probably my own fault that I didn’t enjoy the campaign as much as I did, but my hatred of clown-car enemy-generation is so great that I refused to buy into the game’s fiction.

There's a calliope playing around here somewhere, I just know it.

I did enjoy my time with the multiplayer component, however. Black Ops takes everything that made Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer such a hit and adds a few of its own special herbs and spices (it also fixes many of the glitches and balancing issues from MW2; I’ll have to take the internet’s word for it, because my time with that game was relatively glitch- and exploit-free). In place of a traditional Level Up And Unlock Some Junk progression system is a system where players earn currency called Call Of Duty Points, or COD Points (no word if TROUT and HALIBUT Points are coming in a future DLC release). COD Points are used to buy guns, scopes, and camouflage once the player is at a certain level, adding a degree of customization to progression; rather than unlocking a new sniper rifle that you may not ever use, you can choose to only purchase gear that will be useful to you.

Black Ops also lets players spend COD Points to customize their characters in myriad different ways, from creating a personal emblem (built in a robust graphic editor), to choosing a new targeting reticule for a gun’s scope, to marking weapons with clan tags. Just about every facet of Black Ops’ multiplayer can be personalized, and many will while away the evening customizing their avatars for maximum cool factor and sex appeal.

You can tweak just about everything in the multiplayer.

All of the old game modes return from Modern Warfare 2, along with a few new ones in the form of Wager Matches. Wager Matches are on-the-side modes different from the regular games of Headquarters and Team Deathmatch—players wager COD Points that they will be in the top three, adding a gambling appeal to the content. Players can compete in four different match types: Sticks and Stones (which gives the players a crossbow, throwing knife, and tomahawk), Sharpshooter (which cycles through weapons on a set time interval), One in the Chamber (each person has a gun with one bullet, and subsequent kills give more bullets), and Gun Game (players start with a handgun and climb their way through 20 weapons with each kill). I spent most of my Wager Match time with Gun Game, and though I don’t think it’ll become my primary way to play, it was a fun diversion from the main game.

Where Black Ops’ multiplayer shines the brightest is in its map design. I enjoyed the crap out of Modern Warfare 1 and 2’s multiplayer, but there were always a handful of maps that I felt were just plain bad. I never got that feeling from Black Ops; there were definitely a few maps I was less skilled at, but there were absolutely none that made my blood boil the way Bloc or Estate did.

My favorite map: Nuketown. Think that one place in the fourth Indy movie, sans fridge.

All in all, Black Ops was a worthy rental, though I’m not sure if I’ll make the conversion and purchase it. The multiplayer was fun enough, but the single player wasn’t quite up to snuff for me; a few design issues and an uninteresting story dampened the impact that it could have had. Fans of the Call of Duty series may want to look into Black Ops for its balanced and satisfying Xbox Live play, but those looking for a quality, replayable solo experience may want to test the waters before fully taking the plunge.

Love is a Battlefield – Battlefield: Bad Company 2

As I've mentioned in previous entries, the original Battlefield: Bad Company is one of my favorite games. It combined solid shooting mechanics and a unique multiplayer mode with a strong feeling of levity; the explosions were enormous, the characters quipped and cracked-wise, and the experience was leisurely and pleasantly unforced. The game's quirks and unusual gameplay mechanics (the Vita-Chamber-style respawn system, the team-focused online modes, the large amount of ammo each gun could hold) gave Bad Company a unique flavor, no small order for a modern military shooter in an increasingly crowded market.

Unfortunately for me, many gamers did not share my sentiment about the game's atypical designs (yeah, it sounds up my own ass, but it's true). Bad Company was released a scant eight months after the genre powerhouse and sales behemoth Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and many gamers who purchased it expecting a similar experience received a rude awakening. For many who craved the corridor-driven, fast-paced action of Modern Warfare, this was the Wrong Way To Do It.

I preface this entry with those last two paragraphs on Bad Company only to help set up my disappointment with the direction taken by its sequel, Battlefield: Bad Company 2. This is a game that, by all means, should have been unarguably better than the first game, rather than fitfully so. Granted, many of the complaints that I have are pretty specific to me, so I don't expect many people to necessarily agree with me. I'm just explaining why, when you talk to me about Bad Company 2, I often give an exasperated sigh.

This is the box art from the first game. Notice how less-angry it looks from the box at the top. This should give you a good idea of the tonal differences in both games.

But onto business. Bad Company 2 promises more of the explosive action that helped make the first one a reasonable hit, and boy does it ever deliver. The destruction has been given steroids (the kind that help our Olympic athletes reach new peaks of excellence), and now buildings can be fully razed to the ground. The single player mode also receives a fair amount of explosive set piece moments, and the sound design continues to make sweet, sweet whoopey to the eardrums.

Multiplayer has also been expanded upon. Before there was merely one mode with eight maps (Gold Rush, a game where players take turns attacking and defending crates of gold), and DICE added in the classic Conquest mode and eight Conquest-specific maps through a patch later on. Now, there are four modes of play: Conquest (teams compete to capture bases on the map), Gold Rush (renamed Rush; we'll discuss this in a bit), Squad Deathmatch (a team-based take on deathmatch-style games, with four teams of four competing to get to 50 kills first), and Squad Rush (two teams of four play a smaller game of Rush).

The game benefits from more varied (and much more beautiful) environments than the previous one; lush jungles, harsh deserts, and the freezing heights of the Andes await.

All of this looks to make a game that is, on paper, unequivocally superior to the first one, but it doesn't take too long for a few ointment-flies to rear their ugly heads (and, by metaphor extension, wings). The trouble, for me, started when I first booted up the single player mode. After playing through the first game's campaign several times and loving it, I fully expected to be thrust back into the mix with Sarge, Sweetwater, and Haggard, wrecking things and chatting about Truckasaurus Rex. Imagine my surprise when the game starts in 1944 on some Japanese-controlled island, where you have apparently been tasked with some gritty, espionage-y mission to find a scientist (though my cynical side says that they just wanted to reuse assets from 2009's Battlefield 1943).

The gritty, espionage-y stuff doesn't stop once you leave Japan and arrive in the present day. Oh no. Because many players were put-off by the corny jokes and antics of the first game (including, notably, Morgan Webb in her 2008 review), DICE decided to change its tack and go for a more serious, dramatic story. We rejoin Preston Marlowe and crew (with no attempted explanation of what happened after they supposedly left the army with a truckload of gold at the end of the first game) as they attempt to track down a missing super weapon that is being sought after by Russia (who, according to the loading screen for the mission, have managed to simultaneously invade Europe, South America, and East Asia; you'd think this would be a point of discussion). We're treated to a Clancy-esque tale of drama! suspense! betrayal! sacrifice! The results couldn't be more generic.

Grim, military faces. Get used to them, they're not going anywhere.

Some gameplay tweaks also detract from the first game's light, sandbox-y fun. The Vita-Chamber respawn system has been replaced by the industry-standard Reload From The Last Checkpoint system, which is fine in theory, but gets fairly aggravating. Unlike Modern Warfare, it's generally pretty hard to get an idea of how many bullets you can take until you croak, which lead to a couple moments of experimentation that had me waiting (and waiting!) for my game to reload; I eventually stopped wanting to take chances, and instead chose to grind through the corridors in a slow, safe, partially-dull manner. The under-barrel grenades that made the first game such an explosive playground are back in much shorter supply as well (the control scheme has also been reworked to make them more of a Strategic Option instead of an Oh Hell, Why Not). The upshot is that the single player is significantly less fun to play than the original.

Thankfully, the multiplayer picks up the slack significantly, though not enough to truly be declared the winner in my eyes. The small tweaks are enormous: players can now spawn on individual squad mates instead of a generic "Spawn On Squad" system, the classes have been rebalanced and play nicer together (particularly the Medic, transforming the game into one my roommate calls a First Person Healer), and the destruction makes for different crate-defending tactics. Bad Company 2 cleans up a number of flaws that its predecessor had, and makes it a fairly streamlines experience.

Multiplayer is back and still fun, but there are a few elements that keep it from being all it can be.

But then it also introduces a few flaws as well, most notably the presence of lag EVERYWHERE. Even with some recent patches, it always feels like there's a disconnect between the controller and my character. I thought that the difference was all in my head until I fired up the original Bad Company and found the game to be much more responsive (and even that's pokey compared to Modern Warfare and Halo). Map repetition is also a drawback; Bad Company 2 launched with only five maps in the main multiplayer modes. As someone who likes to play this game nightly, this is WAY too few to prevent a certain feeling of redundancy from setting in; by the time EA rolled out some DLC that increased the number to eight (which is how many the first game came with out of the box), I was so sick of the initial five that I played ad nauseum since launch day that it was too little, too late.

I'm being harder on this game than it deserves. It's ultimately a good product, with a robust multiplayer component, an ambitious single player game, and DICE obviously gave their all to create the best game possible. I'm also willing to acknowledge that many people who buy a Battlefield game will do so for the multiplayer, and won't event give the single player a second (or ever first) look. That said, this is a game that I find difficult to enjoy on the same level as the first. Perhaps I set myself up for this one, but is it too much to expect for a sequel to build on the strengths of its predecessor? This is one of those games where I can't wait for the next one to come out; not because I want to play more (although I do), but because I can't wait for the developers to get it right this time.

War. War never changes. – Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Like everyone else in the game industry, I was moderately curious about Modern Warfare 2 and whether or not it would live up to the INSANE amount of hype that had been generated about it. I really liked the first one (to the point where I bought an Xbox 360 to play it on), but I was a bit scared of retaking the plunge into COD territory. Because I really liked the game, I convinced myself that I should play through the single-player campaign on Hardened and then again on Veteran, and to try and get every single Achievement.

By the time I was finished, I had succeeded in completely ruining the game for myself; on Veteran, the annoying, stupid flaws of the campaign came into much sharper focus, like the infinitely respawning enemies (especially in levels like Charlie Don't Surf and, well, basically every mission where you were an Army Ranger) and the enemies' Dan Marino-esque ability to throw a grenade into my pocket at 200 yards. I also can't really play the multiplayer anymore, on account that I hate at least half of the maps (Bog, Pipeline, and Bloc immediately come to mind, with a few more waiting in the wings), and these maps seem to be the most popular ones.

That said, I can't deny that both the single-player and multiplayer were both really polished and very fun while they lasted, and developer Infinity Ward make some quality first person shooter action, so I decided to rent it to give it a shot. After eight days of time with the game (I figure the small late fee was worth it), I've decided that it's a very polished and much-improved version of a game I had basically already played two years ago.

The single-player campaign has you hopping between different characters in true Call Of Duty fashion, but most of the time is split between Private James Ramirez of the US Army and "Roach" Sanderson of Taskforce 141, an MI6-style organization tasked with doing special ops stuff. While the first game had a relatively down-to-earth style with a couple of over-the-top moments (killing approximately 40,000 Russian soldiers during the last mission seems like a bit too many), this one is flat out Jerry Bruckheimer; this game is unabashedly built around set piece "Holy crap, did you see that?" moments, and the game is simultaneously sillier and more thrilling for it.

Many silly, epic moments pepper the experience.

The developers at Infinity Ward seem to have taken a lot of fan feedback into account with the campaign: there are no infinitely respawning enemies, the mission locales are much more varied than the last game (where there were basically two levels: desert and Russian grassy knoll), and the sniping mission from the first game has received several sequels.

The campaign is short; I plowed through it in one sitting in about five hours. However, it's a really tight, well-executed campaign with virtually no fat or downtime, and had a blast playing through the whole thing in one shot (I would recommend doing it that way, actually). There are still a couple infuriating spots (the last part of the Rio de Janero level looks to be this game's TV station) and some of the moments are just borderline ridiculous (like when you launch a snowmobile over a chasm in order to escape from Russian soldiers), but for the most part the game ran at a consistently high level. There are fewer "Wow" moments than the first game (there's no Death From Above level or anything like that), but most of the game hits such a consistently high bar that it's hard to distinguish one absolutely incredible moment from another one (well, that's not true, but far be it for me to spoil them here).

Infinity Ward utilizes their favorite You Are The Character moments for storytelling.

So the single-player is fun, if a bit ridiculous, but the multiplayer is what made the first game have such lasting appeal (it's been in the top 3 games on Xbox Live since its release two years ago). I spent most of my time with the multiplayer component, and I am pleased to say that everything that bugged my about the first game's multiplayer has been fixed:

• Perks are rebalanced (stupid ones like Iron Lung are unlockable "Pro" perks that stack on top of the regular ones, and Martyrdom has been relegated to a reward for dying too much). Also, your first perk is actually a perk this time, instead of deciding which explosive you get.

• Weapons feel better and less slanted towards the P-90 and M-16. All of them are fun to use, and effective in the right hands.

• The maps are actually fun! I've spent about twelve to fifteen hours in the multiplayer and haven't run across a map that's made me say "Here we go again" (though, like the first one, some of the maps repeat far more often than others, like Quarry).

• You can assign shotguns to your secondary weapon. Lordy lordy lordy, this is something I've wanted for a while; I tend to sprint around the map without looking around too much, so flailing with a shotgun whenever I accidentally run into someone is a great asset.

• You get points for just about everything you do: kill someone after dying a lot, performing a headshot, using a certain weapon enough, using a certain perk enough, everything. This gives a great sense of progression to the game, and it tells me that I don't need to be uber hardcore to level up.

• There are more varied game modes. Specifically, the addition of a Battlefield: Bad Company-style mode called Demolition, in which an attacking team has to plant a bomb on two crates, and a defending team has to prevent them from doing this for a certain amount of time. I think this mode is a bit more broken than B:BC, but is still fun nonetheless.

Demolition gives me some Gold Rush fun.

If I have to fault the multiplayer experience for anything, it's because I have become too accustomed to the freedom that Bad Company's multiplayer gave me. One of the things I liked most about multiplayer for Bad Company was its destructable environments; the ability to destroy walls and obstacles added a whole mess of variety to games, and maps played out differently almost every single time because of that variety. In Modern Warfare 2, each map has a specific set of choke points and places where the fighting generally happens. As I've established before, I'm not that good at FPS games, and I like it in Bad Company that I don't constantly get worked by guys who know the level layout better than I do.

Then there's the co-op Special Ops mode that I didn't get a chance to play. I fooled around with a couple single-player challenges, but it's quite apparent that this game mode works best with two human beings sitting side-by-side on the couch. The first Modern Warfare game lacked any sort of co-op, so I'm glad to see that Infinity Ward understands that playing WITH someone who's way better than you is much more fun than playing AGAINST someone who's way better than you.

Special Ops lets two players tackle moments from the campaign.

All in all, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is more than worth the $60 you would spend of in at Target. The single-player is a tightly scripted, rollercoaster thrill ride, the multiplayer is polished and better than ever, and Special Ops is great for when friends come over. I don't think I'll be getting it just yet (I plan on buying Bad Company 2 in March, and how many online shooters do I need anyways?), but I wouldn't discourage anyone from picking this one up.

Gold! (c) Spandeau Ballet -- Battlefield: Bad Company

As a gamer growing up, I owned mostly Nintendo systems after I got my first Sega Genesis. I started with a Super Nintendo, moved to an N64, then graduated to a Gamecube. Because of my system preferences, I have had the privilege of playing many top-notch platforming games ("Super Mario 64," "Banjo Kazooie," etc) and many top-notch adventure games ("The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time," "Donkey Kong 64," "Jet Force Gemini," etc), but basically NO first-person shooters or racing games. Once I got my Xbox 360 about a year and a half ago, I basically underwent my Gaming Pubescent Rebellion phase; if you were to take a look at my library about four months ago, you would find mostly FPSs and racing games.

One product that I picked up during my I'll Stay In My Room And Listen To The Sex Pistols While Posting Self-Portraits On Myspace Because I'm Sixteen days of gaming was "Battlefield: Bad Company." "Bad Company" is another modern military shooter on a console thigh-deep in modern military shooters, but the thing that struck me about "Bad Company" initially was the incredibly high Things Exploding Per Capita ratio. Most of the environments are totally destructible, meaning that you can blow the hell out of them with your oh-so-convenient under-barrel grenade launcher that's located on almost every gun. Here is a game in which the best way to get the guy who's shooting at you through a window is to blow out the wall that's giving him cover and shoot him in the face.

Just another day at the office.

Once I had finally broken into the single player mode, I found another pleasant surprise: this game does not take itself seriously AT ALL. Most shooters nowadays go out of their way to let you know that you are in an epic conflict and how the fate of the world rests on your shoulders and war is awful and blah blah blah blah blah. "Bad Company" is like one of those cheesy action movies from the 80's that went straight to VHS: the bad guys are caricatures, the good guys often throw out quips during even the most intense firefights and basically give each other noogies during the cutscenes, and everybody's just having a good time shooting at each other and blowing things up.

The game has your character Preston Marlowe joining a lesser-known branch of the Army called Bad Company, a group of degenerate soldiers that are meant to serve as cannon fodder while the other branches do the actual heroing. While out on assignment with cigar-chomping Sergent Redford, Steve Buschemi-esque Sweetwater, and walking Redneck-If joke Haggard, you manage to single-handedly invade a neutral country (don't ask how) and are disavowed by the Army unless you can track down a mercenary leader called The Legionnaire. Coincidentally, The Legionnaire pays all of his soldiers in gold bullion, so your deal with the army could end up lining your pockets...

Your cast of lovable losers: Sarge (left), Sweetwater (middle), and Haggard (right). Yes, Haggard and Sweetwater are playing Rock Paper Scissors.

The story is pretty ridiculous, but it's also very lighthearded with its bad jokes and wanton destruction. The game also has a system that, when you die any enemies you killed before you died will stay dead when you respawn. Many hardcore will cry foul at this feature, saying that they never feel challenged or in danger, but I personally prefer it to Veteran Mode on "Call Of Duty 4," with the enemies John Elway-ing grenades into your pocket at 300 yards, causing you to reload your save ever two-and-a-half minutes. Even if it never "feels like I'm in danger," I'm still having fun because death doesn't cause me to render my last 15 minutes of playtime useless.

Let me explain. I play video games to unwind after kicking around all day, and "Bad Company" is the perfect unwind game. You can basically run around blowing up walls and driving around vehicles to your hearts desire without having to worry about reloading your game if you try something that doesn't work. I did this for probably three or four hours one day during Fall Break last year, and I had an absolute frustration-free blast. Other games that I play for hours at a time usually end up rubbing me the wrong way in spite of my coming back for more, but "Bad Company" was as perfectly happy to let me tool around as I was to do the actual tooling.

Call in a Russian mortar strike for even more fireworks!

The game also has a robust multiplayer mode, one that also is pretty frustration-free. The main mode is called Gold Rush, where two teams take turns attacking or defending two crates of gold in a specific section of the map. If the attacking team succeeds in blowing up the gold, the defending team is pushed back to another section of the map until there are no more crates left. The defenders win if the attackers run out of guys. Most maps are big and have lots of tanks and jeeps lying around for people to drive, but that's not why I like it.

No, why I like it is the team-based approach. I would always play Team Deathmatch in "Call Of Duty 4" multiplayer, and it would always result in me getting my kneecaps shot off about 7.5 seconds after I spawn on the map. "Battlefield's" Gold Rush mode makes the objective not to kill everybody but to attack or defend the gold, a nice single-minded approach to task management that I can appreciate. Instead of trying to cover my teammates and not twitching fast enough to avoid certain death, I would defend my teammate while he plants a bomb on the crates, trying to spot a guy who would run in guns blazing to spoil our plan. To summarize, "Bad Company" makes me not feel like a liability, which I appreciate.

Players can still play the traditional Conquest mode that's been in every "Battlefield" game, but Gold Rush is the real winner.

Actually, the same thing can be said about the whole game. It encourages you to wander around and HAVE FUN, which, incidentally, is why I play games anyways. The game isn't mind-shattering the way Infinity Ward games usually are, but I don't think it's meant to be, and for that I'm grateful. And fortunately for you stingy types, you can find "Bad Company" on Xbox Live for about $20 now. Buy it and practice for when the sequel comes out in March.



Here are some prerelease videos to give you an idea of how seriously this game takes itself:

Parody of those Gears Of War commercials from a couple years ago.

Parody of the Tom Clancy's brand of tactical shooters.

Good old-fashioned trailer.